Happy fall! This month’s Healthy Intersections Podcast focuses on food and climate — a timely topic during the fall harvest months.
Food insecurity and food quality are known as important social determinants of health. For example, the percent of residents receiving food assistance (eg, SNAP) is associated with neighborhood life expectancy. On the other hand, consuming ultra-processed foods and not eating fruits and vegetables are well-known risk factors for many health conditions, including the top two killers: heart disease and cancer.
Healthy food is necessary for overall wellbeing. It’s required for survival, but it can also be an expression of love, family, and culture, as well as a source of great satisfaction and delight!
And yet, with climate change, we are being forced to confront several realities:
- Agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change
- Agriculture and the food supply are greatly affected by climate change
- Agriculture and food have the potential to be solutions to addressing climate change
Our special guests this month are Robert Beach, PhD, a Fellow in the Agricultural, Resource & Energy Economics and Policy Program at RTI International, and Carol Schmitt, PhD, Chief Scientist at RTI.
Scroll on for the video and transcript! If you just want to listen to or download the audio, you can find it on your favorite podcast platform or here on Pod-o-Matic.
Video
Transcript (lightly edited)
00:00:01:21 – 00:00:39:15
Lisa Lines
Hi everyone, and welcome to the September 2023 Healthy Intersections Podcast. I’m Lisa Lines, the host of this podcast, and I’m also a senior health services researcher at RTI International.The podcast is sponsored by the American Public Health Association’s Medical care section and the Medical Care Journal. We are also hosted on the Medical Care blog, and I hope that you will subscribe to the blog and subscribe to this podcast so that you’ll get notifications when we put out our next episode.
I’m joined today by two other researchers from RTI: Dr. Carol Schmitt, and Dr. Robert Beach. Carol, would you please introduce yourself?
00:00:39:15 – 00:00:58:22
Carol Schmitt
Hi, I’m Carol Schmitt, coming to you from Keystone, Colorado today.I’m a chief scientist at RTI. I worked many, two and a half decades in public health, and the last few years I’ve been working on bringing together public health and all our researchers at RTI in climate change.
00:00:58:22 – 00:01:02:21
Lisa Lines
Wonderful. Thanks so much for joining us today. And Robert.00:01:02:21 – 00:01:26:01
Robert Beach
I’m Robert Beach. I’m a senior agriculture and resource economist at RTI, and you know, I’ve really been focusing on issues related to the impacts of agriculture on climate, as well as climate on agriculture. For over, over 20 years now. And I’m really excited about joining the discussion today.00:01:26:21 – 00:02:04:16
Lisa Lines
Wow, thanks so much. And yeah, and that is really where we’re going to be sitting today in our conversation. I’m going to be talking about the interplay between climate, climate change, climate and global weirding and the food supply and framing food in several different ways. These relationships go multiple directions. So, you know, food and agriculture are one of the biggest contributors to climate change, probably the third biggest at last I saw.00:02:04:16 – 00:02:36:09
Lisa Lines
Does that jive with what you’ve heard as well? When you count up everything that goes into agriculture production, the transportation of fuel and foods and agricultural products and the emissions from livestock and all of the things that go along with industrial food production, which is, you know, like I say, highly industrial and also a huge driver of greenhouse gas emissions.00:02:36:11 – 00:03:11:10
Lisa Lines
And then at the same time, the feedback loop there is that those greenhouse gas emissions are raising the temperatures and driving drought and driving really unpredictable weather patterns. And weather patterns are one of the biggest, most important things for good crop production, right? So climate change is affecting food. Food is affecting climate change, right? But there’s also a third piece of this puzzle, which is that food and agriculture can actually offer a lot of solutions to the climate change problem.00:03:11:12 – 00:03:39:01
Lisa Lines
So that’s our set up here and why it matters to public health. Obviously, food is essential to well-being, and healthy food also can be a real expression of love and family and connections to our cultures, can be a great source of joy and also can really, if we aren’t making healthy choices, can really affect our health in negative ways.00:03:39:03 – 00:04:09:06
Lisa Lines
So the highly processed foods, the industrial food supply kind of feeding us these, you know, extra caloric, low nutrient kinds of foods that are kind of part of the default American lifestyle and heavily subsidized, by the way, with our current food production system. So this is why I think it really matters to public health. But I also think public health needs to be talking about climate change.00:04:09:06 – 00:04:32:23
Lisa Lines
And actually, just so you know, full disclosure here, I’m a member of the American Public Health Association, have been since 2006. And in 2020, the executive director of the APHA, Georges Benjamin, Dr. Benjamin suggested that people who are members of APHA get trained to learn how to talk about climate change to other people.00:04:33:00 – 00:04:56:22
Lisa Lines
And he encouraged us to actually get trained by the Climate Reality Project, and I did in 2020. I’m involved in my local chapter here in Los Angeles, and I’m the co-chair of the Food Committee. And that’s where we’ve sort of been talking about in our local area, because, you know, urban agriculture is a potential solution to climate resilience.00:04:56:22 – 00:05:20:24
Lisa Lines
Los Angeles is fed by, you know, the Central Valley of California right up the road where they grow probably two thirds of the fruits and vegetables in the U.S., if I’m remembering my stats correctly. So that’s where I’m coming from. And I’m going to stop there and ask both of you to talk about where you’re coming from in this framing. Carol, why don’t you go ahead and start.00:05:21:00 – 00:05:54:03
Carol Schmitt
Sure. You know, food is, like Lisa alluded to, it’s circular. And the creation of food, as we said, creates more greenhouse gases and pollution, and yet people, they’re producing what people like. They’re producing what is incentivized. And it’s difficult if you’re going to, and I’m sure Robert will talk a little bit more about how you can change the types of crops, the way that you produce food.00:05:54:05 – 00:06:28:24
Carol Schmitt
But if people will buy it, if they will eat it, if they won’t eat less beef, for example, it doesn’t matter because it won’t be financially viable. And so there’s a real role here, I think, for some kind of communications strategy to change people’s behaviors and feelings about food. On the other hand, you know, Lisa mentioned the, the agriculture bill, the farm bill earlier, and there are all kinds of incentives in there to farmers to do different kind of practices, and that could make things better.00:06:28:24 – 00:07:06:11
Carol Schmitt
And as I said earlier, I think back to the Dust Bowl and it was the government intervention that came in and changed what were pretty bad agricultural practices and stirring up all that, all the dust that made it stop. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from. You have to change the demand that will change the type of foods that you produce, and then you have to incentivize the producers of food.00:06:51:12 – 00:07:06:11
Lisa Lines
Right? I mean, why are the healthiest options the most expensive? Hmm. Robert, maybe you as an economist can answer that question.00:07:06:11 – 00:07:40:16
Robert Beach
Well, as Carol touched on, it depends, very much how much does it cost to grow different crops and what’s most suitable to grow in different regions. There are certainly also big effects of different policies in place. They do provide subsidies, and in some cases provide insurance, provide incentives to grow certain crops over others just based on the relative returns at a given level of riskiness that you can achieve as a farmer.00:07:40:23 – 00:08:07:02
Robert Beach
And certainly, in a lot of our work, in terms of trying to model from these interactions and implications one of the really important areas where agriculture can have an impact too is just land use and actually conversion of, moving land in and out of forests in agriculture really has a really important role in terms of what the net greenhouse gas emissions are in addition to production practices.00:08:07:02 – 00:09:12:08
Robert Beach
Right. And as Carol had referenced, there are incentives potentially from the government to incentivize different activities on the demand side, if they’re to the extent that there were markets and people willing to pay for climate smart commodities. Again, if there was a sufficient premium there, you would expect that people would start to, shift their practices, in order to sell into those markets.And there’s also some of that at the retailer level where, Wal-Mart or other big retailers, are really interested in sustainability efforts and they’re trying to, and they’re pushing those down onto their suppliers and trying to, require certain practices. So, again, certainly, to the extent that the American public, the consumers are really interested in that and willing to pay more for it; That’s certainly a way that you could drive a lot of change in the food system in terms of what’s being produced and how.
00:09:12:08 – 00:10:23:01
Lisa Lines
So connecting these dots, we need maps, right? I mean, that’s kind of my favorite way to kind of understand what’s happening is to actually look at the data. So I’m going to pull up a website called Climate Explorer. This is not an RTI product, but it is one that I thought was really helpful and interesting to look at climate change on a couple of dimensions,definitely not all of them. I think one of the things that’s missing here is that we don’t have the ability to look at drought. We have total precipitation, but we actually have historical drought data now and could certainly, there’s certainly models to show what that drought stuff is going to look like down the line. But here we are, we do have dry days and we have total precipitation.
Then we also have various other measures of maximum and minimum temperature. I think we discussed this earlier. Let’s look at days with the maximum temperature greater than 90. And right now, we’re zoomed out to the whole U.S. For those of you who can’t see this and are just listening to the audio, I’ll try and describe what we’re looking at here.
00:10:23:01 – 00:11:36:15
Lisa Lines
So on the screen we have the historical 1961 to 1990 averages across the whole U.S. for the days with the maximum temperature greater than 90 degrees. And you can see, southern Texas is a bright, bright red areas there which correspond to around maybe 160 to 180 days. And then here in southern Arizona, lots of bright red there corresponding to up to 200 days with the maximum temperature of 90.And then over into, sort of Death Valley in the desert area of California, southern Nevada, lots of lots of red there. But if we go over to this little slider, we see under different scenarios, there’s a lower emission and a higher emission scenario. We’re going to stick with the higher emission scenario and looking at and projecting out to the 2040s, if I move this slider, you can see that the days with the maximum temp over 90 go up to over 180 to 200 across almost all of our agricultural lands. So thoughts on this map, Carol.
00:11:36:20 – 00:12:15:06
Carol Schmitt
Well, I think it kind of speaks to where you’re hitting in areas that are the places where America’s food comes from and even above and beyond healthy food, food, period. If we change the climates so precipitously and if we again, we didn’t talk about it yet, but you know that Ogallala Aquifer, the droughts that we’re going into, people won’t have food and they won’t have water.00:12:15:06 – 00:12:42:02
Carol Schmitt
And that creates social upheaval. It’s going to create a lot of population migration. You know, I really think that people don’t understand how dire this could be if we don’t take action. Because, again, this threatens the parts of the country that grow all the food, that when you go to the grocery store and you always take it for granted, it’s going to be there.00:12:42:04 – 00:13:22:12Lisa Lines
Yeah and actually you mentioned water. So let’s look at actually summertime precipitation under current historic current sort of trends here. And then as we look at the projections into the 2040s, we’re seeing a lot of drying out across the south, especially in California, and that’s the one of the major food production areas in the U.S. So, Robert, what are your thoughts on this map? What does it make you think?00:13:22:14 – 00:13:46:15
Robert Beach
Well, I think it is really striking in a lot of these projections. You know, for a lot of crops, it depends on individual crops, what those thresholds are. But for a lot of a lot of crops, of course, being warmer to some degree helps the crop grow better, but that’s only true up to a certain threshold.00:13:46:17 – 00:14:09:13
Robert Beach
And so what we’re seeing now is with hitting those thresholds where you’re getting to be above 90 degrees, or above the threshold for a particular crop more and more frequently, that’s going to tend to have sizable effects on the yields of those crops. Or at some point you may have some crop loss with hitting the temperatures that high.00:14:09:15 – 00:14:45:08
Robert Beach
And there’s really important interactions with precipitation. As you’re showing in this map and these scenarios, it’s getting really dry, especially in California, especially stands out. And if you’re getting warmer and wetter, there’s not as much of an effect on yields. But where you’re getting warmer, and also drier, and going above these thresholds, you’re going to have not enough water for these crops and that’s where you’re likely to see some pretty, pretty substantial reductions in in yields.00:14:45:08 – 00:15:11:21
Robert Beach
You know, it may be that different areas of the country are becoming more and less suitable where you may see the most important crop regions.There may be some pressure to shift northward a bit just because of that. And they may or may not, may not be as suitable for poor soil or other reasons. But you can see some areas in the south in particular, of course, getting relatively less suitable for growing some of the key crops that have historically been grown there.
00:15:11:21 – 00:15:57:00
Lisa Lines
Yeah. I mean, when we look at the brown, we’re looking at negative numbers of days with precipitation. What I suspect is that a lot of the country that we, where we currently have agriculture will be unsuitable. I mean, think about what’s going on now in the Mississippi Valley right along here, coming up from here and then going into the Gulf of Mexico.You know, this whole area, they grow a lot of stuff along here. And I was just reading about how the Mississippi, because of the drought that they’ve experienced in the last two years, is slowed down to almost its slowest flow rate ever; similar to what happened to the Colorado River, where the Colorado River slowed down to the point where it no longer even reached the ocean.
00:15:57:02 – 00:16:30:20
Lisa Lines
So, if we have that happening in Mississippi, where we have saltwater intrusion up and then drying up downstream, that’s going to really cause a lot of issues. And from my perspective, when I think about like food and agriculture as solutions and solutions that can be used to make our food system more sustainable, more regenerative, more resilient to climate change, one of the things that immediately comes to my mind is, you know, we waste a lot of water in this country.00:16:30:22 – 00:16:59:24
Lisa Lines
Why are we watering agriculture at all with any potable water? Right? So potable water should be used for potable purposes only, and agriculture should be depending on gray water for irrigation. That’s my opinion. I don’t know how feasible it would be to switch everybody over to gray water overnight. Obviously, that really would be difficult.But I know that we do have some incentives in the farm bill around that. Can you talk about that a little bit, Carol or Robert?
00:16:59:24 – 00:17:14:14
Carol Schmitt
I was going to ask Robert actually about that because you talked about, we talked a little bit earlier about how it has it there, there were insurance parts of it. There were agricultural practices parts of it.00:17:14:16 – 00:17:35:18
Carol Schmitt
But if the climate is changing, which it is, and it’s probably past the point where it’s going to stay the way it is now. What kind of crop insurance or crop change, do you see? And what kind of insurances are there to farmers and what kind of incentives?00:17:35:21 – 00:17:59:01
Robert Beach
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, there are a lot of price supports for certain commodities in the farm bill, along with a lot of conservation programs in there that can incentivize farmers to use certain practices that may be more environmentally friendly.And crop insurance is an important part of all this because agriculture
very dependent on whether there’s, you’re always faced a lot of production risk normally every year.00:17:59:01 – 00:18:48:00
Robert Beach
There are a lot of insurance programs that are subsidized by the government but you know, historically, a lot of those programs have been more focused on some of the major commodity crops. The major row crops with less protection historically for some of the fruits and vegetables, specialty crops, where they’re less widely grown. There’s less data, there are less programs available for them.But certainly, through design of a farm bill, you could think about ways that you could try to more strongly incentivize certain activities, whether it’s production of healthy foods or production of foods that are following more environmentally friendly practices or lower greenhouse gas emitting practices.
The farm bill is one way that you could act to really broadly incentivize change across producers, across the whole country.
00:18:46:21 – 00:18:52:17
Carol Schmitt
Actually, is this a federal responsibility, a state responsibility, a community responsibility?00:18:52:17 – 00:19:27:20
Robert Beach
A good question. Maybe. I mean, the farm bill, of course, is Federal. There are also state and local. And, of course, the land grant universities and extension services operate at the state level and county level in terms of implementing, and the degree that they are providing information, but where should it be? I guess is obviously maybe a good question, although some of these problems, like climate change, are not really a local problem. It’s pretty important really, I think, to try to address that across a broad scale, as broad as possible.00:19:27:20 – 00:19:40:17
Robert Beach
And try to capture more of that production under your policies and not have incentives in one place where so, maybe lower emissions in one place, but then the emissions move somewhere else.00:19:40:20 – 00:20:11:10
Lisa Lines
Yeah. So, thanks for that, Robert. And I wanted to just share some other maps that we can look at to sort of look about, you know, kind of understand climate change and potential impacts on food, agriculture and human health. Right? So here we have the EPA’s EJ screen dashboard, and EJ stands for Environmental Justice, and that’s a big priority now for the Biden administration.00:20:11:12 – 00:20:45:08
Lisa Lines
There’s been an executive order that every agency needs to be taking environmental justice into account. So, we saw this year with the huge amount of precipitation we got in California and the snowpack in the Sierra national forests. There was, in the area here which is outlined or sort of here shown in kind of bright orange, reddish color, the largest freshwater lake west of the Rocky Mountains to Tulare Lake or Tulare.00:20:45:10 – 00:21:14:13
Lisa Lines
And when we had all that flooding, that whole area, which was farmland, was flooded. So, all of the chemicals and all of that went right into the water. And sort of it’s a, it’s quite a sad story. And we look now, we see that when you drain lakes and then make them into farms, sometimes nature has a way of saying, “hey now, you can’t really get away with that”.00:21:14:13 – 00:21:35:11
Lisa Lines
So, I mean, this area was supposed to be a lake. And just because we humans have the hubris to turn the land use into something else, that doesn’t necessarily mean that nature is always going to go along with it, especially as we get into these really unpredictable weather patterns coming down the pike. So and, you know, this area is also very poor.00:21:35:13 – 00:21:57:20
Lisa Lines
On average, it’s a, it’s not a wealthy neighborhood. And when we talk about the state and federal responses, the civil engineers were out there, the Army Corps of Engineers. And there were a lot of folks from the state government who kind of helped out with that response.00:21:57:20 – 00:22:25:10
Lisa Lines
But we knew it was going to happen and it’ll happen again. You see that the flood risk in those areas is in the 95% and higher. So, when we think about wildfire, that also has a huge impact on agriculture and on human health. We know that the agricultural practices that we’ve engaged in have actually increased wildfire risk.00:22:25:10 – 00:23:00:13
Lisa Lines
I don’t know if you either, if you want to talk more about that, but the fact that we’ve kind of not done the controlled burns and that kind of thing, and kind of changed the watersheds and all of that, wildfire risk is just off the charts here across California; and not just California, we think about wildfire risk across the whole U.S. We can zoom out and see the risk is substantial, especially across the east or west of the Rockies area.00:23:00:18 – 00:23:23:20
Robert Beach
Yeah, no, I think that’s certainly true. And I think it’s been, it’s increasingly recognized that, some of the fire suppression policies are not doing enough of the prescribed burns has left in these areas pretty susceptible to wildfire. And then you combine that with, potentially getting hotter and drier in some of these areas under climate change,00:23:23:20 – 00:23:45:13
Robert Beach
and you see that risk start to really rise. And we’ve experienced that in recent years, and not just in the U.S., Canada has had, of course, has had a huge issue with wildfires. And of course, it was we heard about a lot earlier this year because there was so much smoke drifting over the United States, but it’s also it’s a big source of emissions.00:23:45:13 – 00:23:50:18
Lisa Lines
And we no longer have those forests to actually act as carbon sinks, right?00:23:50:20 – 00:24:14:14
Robert Beach
Well, yeah, that’s right. With them burning there, you’re releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere very rapidly. You know, and then I guess depending on what happens with it, whether it comes back as a forest or not, it’s contributing to emissions as well as health problems; just all the particulate matters that drift across United States and into populated areas and contribute heavily to particulate matter emissions, and especially in the Western United States.00:24:14:14 – 00:24:44:00
Lisa Lines
Yeah. And Carol, you’re in Colorado. So I know you’re currently at the Colorado Public Health Association annual meeting, which you were a principal organizer of. So congrats on that. And so what are the discussions happening in Colorado around climate change and climate risks and issues?00:24:44:00 – 00:25:11:12
Carol Schmitt
It’s interesting because when we talk about state versus local, you know, we’re in Colorado. We have these really, this legislation that we’re going to reduce down to next to zero our production of electricity from coal. But we are right next to Wyoming, who even though there are only a million people that live there at the most, they produce more coal, more electricity per capita than anybody else. And this dirty little secret is Colorado gets electricity from Wyoming.00:25:11:14 – 00:25:42:09
Carol Schmitt
And so there’s that. And there’s also when you talk about farmers, my sister was mentioning this because there’s, I’m going to host a presentation in about an hour about emissions from the extraction industry. and Colorado’s had legislation, RTI actually has a project where they’re looking at the impact of extraction industry emissions on at risk populations,00:25:42:11 – 00:26:06:17
Carol Schmitt
but the bottom line is a lot of these wells sit in the middle of farmers acreage and they get money from it. And these are guys that don’t make that much money. And so that, those are kind of the issues there that you have a state that’s really trying hard, but they can’t, they’re limited.00:26:06:17 – 00:26:32:19
Carol Schmitt
They can do only what they can do within the state. We have a pretty robust, on the Western over by Grand Junction, a lot of fruit, vegetables, but it’s been in over 100 degrees. I don’t know how many days this year. It’s been really awful. So, in of course, there’s the water issues. But, you know, we live up towards the upper end of the Colorado River where the water’s already there.00:26:32:21 – 00:27:30:02
Carol Schmitt
But when I asked my colleagues in the Fort Collins office about what is water policy, because I’m thinking, “oh, we can do like we do public health policy, change the environment so the healthy choices, the effortless way we can solve that”. Well they told me, they said, “oh, Carol, water policy is water rights from about 1800”, and you read about it more and more with California, Arizona, Colorado are all fighting about the water. So, those are the issues here right now.Lisa Lines
00:27:06:00 – 00:27:42:23
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I’m going to share another, share another map because I love them. And, you know, I think it’s a great way for us to understand our country better. Looking at the EPA’s enviro atlas here, and here we have some interesting metrics we could look at.Robert, what would you like to select here? We have acres of pollinated crops with no nearby pollinator habitat. Green veggie crops, fruit crops.
00:27:42:23 – 00:28:14:08
Robert Beach
Well yes. Yeah. Yields of vegetable, vegetable crops. Okay. So, and then of course is getting out like we talk I mean, I think we touched on a little bit earlier parts, California is relatively high yielding. But also, in any extremely important area for production of vegetables, fruits, nuts, that’s also likely to be fairly strongly impacted by climate change as we were, as we are looking at earlier.00:28:14:10 – 00:28:26:04
Lisa Lines
Break out of here. You know, that’s a desert area and they are growing thirsty crops there in the Imperial Valley and along that border.00:28:26:04 – 00:29:06:22
Robert Beach
Yeah, no that’s a good point too. I guess some of these areas where you’re growing out west, where you’re growing basically in deserts, the only way you can do that, of course, is with a lot of water. You have to be irrigating heavily to grow in some of these, in some of these regions where you’re growing some cotton in Arizona in other places where you can get, you can get high yields. And in some of those places, but sometimes that is subject to having a lot of water availability and using a lot of water per, per unit of output.00:29:06:24 – 00:29:33:00
Lisa Lines
Yeah. And we looked earlier at Texas and how hot Texas is going to be and look at the cotton production yields here quite in the higher, the highest category right across there. Right. So, and cotton is one of those vegetables or one of those things you cannot eat. You can’t eat it. It’s, and it’s very, very thirsty.00:29:33:02 – 00:29:37:19
Robert Beach
Cotton tends to use a lot of water. It is a water intensive crop.00:29:37:19 – 00:30:05:09
Lisa Lines
And I think one of the things I just wanted to mention, we we’ve been talking about how would we want to measure in a single number the risks of where you have high climate impact, low resilience and high vulnerability. And that kind of a summary score would be really great to have to help us plan to figure out like where we need to have bigger interventions.00:30:05:15 – 00:30:51:21
Lisa Lines
And so we’ve talked about that. And I think, when we do a dashboard with something like that, we want to look at like we showed earlier, the historical patterns and then the projections with that kind of nice way to look across the whole country. But really, I feel these maps are wonderful, but it’s really hard to really understand
these multiple complex interactions with just looking at one measure at a time on these maps.So, what are your thoughts on how we can actually convey the impact, or potential impact, the risks of big impacts to general audiences and to the public health community?
00:30:51:21 – 00:31:26:06
Robert Beach
Well I mean, something we’ve looked at some, and others have to as it’s maybe at least partly, partly address that is, is really trying to look at trying to estimate y under future climate change, what are the expected effects? How much do you expect productivity to change across the United States combined with for, a number of different commodities?Yeah, you’re pulling up livestock now. We’ve talked more about crops, but livestock are potentially affected by heat stress.
00:31:26:08 – 00:31:39:16
Lisa Lines
Oh, yeah, the chickens will die. Yeah, the chickens are in these coops, are just croaking at very high rates and between the flu, bird flu and heat, I mean.00:31:39:18 – 00:32:24:13
Robert Beach
Well yeah right. Yeah. You may have effects on, on infectious diseases under climate change changing patterns of vectors and where diseases spread. But yeah, heat stress, you have impacts on forage that certain livestock would be, would be eating and then you’re just effects on the costs of production or how you might produce if you have to extend you effects grain production, grain prices.I mean of course that’s where more and more of the grain in the United States goes to feed animals than people directly. So, there’s a lot of effects on the livestock as well.
00:32:24:13 – 00:32:30:05
Lisa Lines
And not just in our country, right? I mean, in Brazil. The clear cutting for the ranching.00:32:30:07 – 00:32:40:12
Robert Beach
Well, yeah, throughout the world, and the United States is also a huge exporter, an important source of food too at the global level.00:32:40:12 – 00:32:51:21
Robert Beach
So you could start to look at what’s the distribution of the expected changes in in productivity, in yields across the United States versus where is production now.00:32:51:21 – 00:33:20:19
Robert Beach
So look at where you may expect to see the most, the regions most vulnerable to negative impacts under climate change. And then like you are getting, you could go a step further and try to, I don’t think there’s as much of this that’s been done, but maybe can connect it what might happen to food prices or to healthy food prices relative to others?00:33:20:23 – 00:33:44:24
Robert Beach
And what does that mean for diets that people in different demographic groups or income groups, what are they able to afford and what does that mean then for their health through changes that they may need to make in their diet based on what’s available, what’s accessible, what they can afford.00:33:44:24 – 00:34:16:00
Carol Schmitt
That’s exactly what I was thinking about, is, can we fundamentally, if we can model this, can we fundamentally change what we incentivize farmers to produce? Because if maybe cotton doesn’t grow, there’s something else we can eat. Or if we can’t grow lettuce in, down in the western hot part of Arizona anymore, is there something else we could grow there that people could eat, or could it be somewhere else?00:34:16:02 – 00:34:47:13
Lisa Lines
Or could it be solar farms?00:34:47:13 – 00:35:02:06
Carol Schmitt
Yeah, Yeah. And I was laughing because you had Weld County there with all the cattle, and I live in Larimer County right next door. I could smell it when the wind’s from the East, but anyway, I am struck by, we have this pattern of food production that is built on, like Robert said earlier, all this water availability, this heat that could really produce long a long crop season.And I would think, are people working, are scientists working on how we should get ready to change what we produce?
00:35:02:06 – 00:35:22:19
Robert Beach
Well and I mean, and there’s interest. Some of this is fairly long term, as you might expect, or it takes a lot to do it. But I mean, there is work on drought tolerant, heat tolerant, salinity tolerant versions of some of these crops, and I think sometimes there are at least recommendations.00:35:22:19 – 00:35:57:12
Robert Beach
I mean, still really at the at the producer level, it depends more on what you see as the relative returns controlling for riskiness right of different crops, but there are, even in some settings, recommendations; maybe you look at crops that don’t require as much water, along with research into developing varieties that would still be able to thrive in a hotter, drier world, or where you have saltwater intrusion.00:35:57:12 – 00:36:14:07
Robert Beach
As you know, you’re sort of touching on earlier, if you are pulling water out and you’re getting your, and you’re getting saltwater intrusion coming in and then the water that you’re putting on crops are getting a little saltier, of course that’s bad for most crops.00:36:15:18 – 00:36:35:02
Robert Beach
Or I know like in international settings sometimes, there’s recommendations to move towards just natural crops that grow near marshlands and are naturally more salt tolerance, or otherwise try to adjust what you’re growing as the environmental conditions are changing.00:36:35:04 – 00:37:09:10
Lisa Lines
Yeah, and so the farm bill, going back to that, I think it’s in the ideal scenario that that bill would have some supports for farmers to sort of transition their practices, but also support for practices like keeping the roots in the ground, keeping ground cover and cover crops, , always keeping those roots in the ground and building the soil because we actually have a lot of problems with erosion.00:37:09:10 – 00:37:35:13
Lisa Lines
I was showing earlier a lot of problems across the whole country with soil erosion because of agriculture, and they’re doing things like taking a forest, cutting it down and then turning that into farmland. So, you basically quadruple the problems that we have in terms of climate change when you do that, because you remove the tree cover so that you no longer have that climate sink or carbon sink.00:37:35:15 – 00:37:58:06
Lisa Lines
You’ve potentially stripped your soils. You’re basically taking advantage of all that leaf litter and stuff that made some nice fertile soil. But I don’t think a lot of farmers are really replenishing it when they take it out, right? So that kind of cover cropping and replenishing the soils and that kind of thing.00:37:58:08 – 00:38:31:22
Lisa Lines
There’s a lot of really interesting sustainable agriculture practices out there. We talked about mono cropping versus more diversified kinds of farms where you are able to do things more in an ecosystem kind of way. And we don’t have a whole lot more time today. We’re just about out of time. So before we break, I do want to say, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re wondering about how you can plug in to advocacy, I mentioned the Climate Reality Project.00:38:31:24 – 00:39:07:19
Lisa Lines
There are chapters across the whole U.S. There’s also a really big effort happening, spearheaded by a group called Regenerate America, and they’re actually working on advocacy and lobbying our representatives to let our representatives know how important it is that this Farm bill renegotiation happens every five years. So it’s an opportunity to actually try to build in some of this climate resilience and supports for farmers in a way that takes into account the many stakeholders across our country.00:39:07:21 – 00:39:34:07
Lisa Lines
So direct democracy, that’s my pitch. Go forth and call your representatives. Send them postcards or whatever, if you care about this stuff, and if you’re in public health, you probably should care about this stuff, right? Right, Carol. Yes. Yes. So final thoughts, Carol and Robert, why don’t you go ahead first, Carol, go.00:39:34:07 – 00:39:58:00
Carol Schmitt
God I wasn’t ready for final thoughts. But I guess it is. I always learn something new when I talk to Robert about agriculture, which is really good because I had been thinking more in terms of how people are going to be able to live in these spaces, their houses. But the fact that our food is at risk and it, just like everything else in this area, it’s going to take a big investment.00:39:58:00 – 00:40:27:06
Carol Schmitt
And I always go back to why I love our economists because you have to use that if you don’t spend this now, it’s going to be so unwieldy. You’re going to lose lives and spend a lot more money in the future. That’s kind of what I think about this, is that we really need a strong economic argument to take to our representatives, because otherwise they just blow it off. I shouldn’t probably say that, but they do blow it off.00:40:27:08 – 00:40:55:19
Lisa Lines
Well, I mean, yeah, dollars make it more concrete. And actually, we were looking at that EPA map I was showing in the background, and I was showing that there are some measures there around the dollar amount attached to avoiding emergency department visits for asthma exacerbations because you got recover, right? So I love how the EPA is doing that, and they’re actually bringing in that economic argument right there in their dashboard.Robert, final thoughts?
00:40:55:21 – 00:41:20:17
Robert Beach
Yeah, thanks a lot. I think it’s been an interesting discussion, and I think it’s really important and I know I’ve been interested, more in recent years, and interacting more with public health people because I’ve been doing a lot of agriculture and forestry modeling, but thinking about, what does this actually mean when you have changes in production, or costs of food, or some of these other impacts.00:41:20:17 – 00:41:51:20
Robert Beach
I mean, that of course translates into higher food cost. And what does that mean? Well, it impacts nutrition. It impacts affordability of diets, affordability of healthy foods. And to me, I think it’s really important. I’ve been really interested in trying to go a little further in terms of , what those climate impacts mean for agriculture in terms of the human health impacts.00:41:51:20 – 00:42:11:17
Robert Beach
And I think it is a really important aspect to consider when you’re looking at climate change, just to think about, , what does this mean for availability of food in the cost of a diet? And how does that affect health of Americans, as well as people around the world?00:42:11:19 – 00:42:52:05
Lisa Lines
Yeah, I mean, we’re kind of spoiled. Actually, relatively speaking, compared to historical prices for food, they used to spend a lot more of our food budget or budgets on food as a country. So, things are shifting. We do see a lot of changes in the economy because of climate change. And hopefully, as we continue to make infrastructure investments, and investments in our farmers, and investments in keeping the roots in the soil and rebuilding soil, and investments in clean energy, and using agricultural waste for energy production for example, things like that,00:42:52:11 – 00:43:23:19
Lisa Lines
finding more use for agricultural byproducts; Methane could potentially be a power source, right? We didn’t have time to do a deep dive into every aspect of this, but I hope our podcast listeners will go out and learn more on their own. And I would just want to thank you both again for coming on and talking with us today about food and agriculture and climate change and public health.00:43:23:21 – 00:43:24:24
Lisa Lines
Thanks so much.00:43:24:24 – 00:43:25:20
Carol Schmitt
Thank you, Lisa.00:43:25:24 – 00:43:27:10
Robert Beach
Thank you, Lisa.00:43:27:10 – 00:43:39:21
Lisa Lines
Looking forward to hearing from you, listeners and viewers. You can leave a comment right in the comments on the blog. And we look forward to seeing you next month here on the Healthy Intersections podcast.
Lisa M. Lines